Sunday, 17 May 2015

I visited Te Papa, New Zealand's National
Museum, in Wellington recently. There is an extensive presentation of their
Maori, but even more of their British, heritage, along with the stories of the
migrations, the backgrounds, and of the many refugees that New Zealand has
taken in. But the major exhibition at the Museum was of the displays and videos
commemorating the Gallipoli invasion during the First World War. Gallipoli,
that’s part of Turkey – so what did that have to do with New Zealanders?
Britain, that’s what. They were the King’s men and part of the Empire, so it
was their duty. So without any more reason than that, they went to they didn’t
know what– and over 90% of them died.
So, no, I didn’t go to see that.

Despite this, New Zealand is still quite British;
they even celebrate the Queen’s birthday. But what is Britain and British? Is
it a distinctive flag, tea, Big Ben, Edwardian costumes, the Beatles and Monty
Python? Or is that English? Or even UK-ish? Surely all that’s past, anyway –
except for the Union Jack. As for that … (And what is a nation, anyway?)

The recent General Elections cleared some
of the identity fog for me. One result of the election has been that the
northern end of the island of Britain voted in large numbers for the Scottish
Nationalist Party, which seeks independence from the southern ‘English’ end.
Meanwhile, the party that won more seats in England also became the government
of the United Kingdom, a state that includes Britain plus a chunk of Ireland.
This party is antipathetic to the SNP.So currently, with regard to ‘United’, the omens are clearly not good.
Especially, as some folk are eager to point out, since, although the
Conservative Party won most seats, they didn't get a majority of votes. This is
because of the electoral system: if there were proportional representation,
Parliament would have had a very mixed bag of disagreeing members who would have
to debate and form compromises. This, although confusing, would be closer to
the nature of British society; we are mongrels of differing views who come from
all over the place – even the royalty. Consequently, a brighter side of the
national identity is the ability to accommodate differences; it resists fixed
or absolute ideologies, supports tolerance and gives rise to a self-deprecating
sense of humour. Yes, open access, freedom of speech, democracy, the Trade
Union movement and the suffragettes, social welfare, BBC and the National
Health Service, that’s my sense of what the nation is about. That’s not English
or Scottish; that is, or was, British. And more than that: it’s in line with the
social development the world over that allows people to function with a sense
of mutual respect and encourages cooperation.

The ability to accommodate internal
differences is what distinguishes a nation from its antecedent, the tribe.
Tribes are great on internal loyalty and kinship with land, but poor on
cooperation with other tribes. For the Maori, inter-tribal warfare was the
norm; they couldn't work as a unified force. Nationhood, on the other hand,
arrives at unity through constant internal negotiation, compromise and
cooperation. The achievement of nationhood is not of unquestioning obedience to
a leader, but the willingness to forge and abide with overarching laws that
define an ethos.

In this light, it’s good to recollect why
in his time and place, the Buddha considered the Vajjian confederacy as a model
state. The seven features that made it strong were:

(1)They held frequent public meetings of
their tribe which they all attended;

(2) they met together to make their
decisions and carried out their undertakings in concord;

(3) they didn't abolish long-term principles
and they honoured their pledges;

It is said that the Buddha so admired this
republican and democratic method that he used it as the model for how his
Sangha would deal with their business. Translating that list into something
more timeless, we might say that the recipe for a healthy nation is a mix of
open discourse, respect for values and care for its people.

‘Open discourse’: well the various trails
of embarrassing leaked memos suggest that much of what happens in the modern
State goes in is in secret. But maybe that's to keep us safe from the Enemy.
‘Carry out their undertakings in concord.’ Yes, in the UK Parliament, we have
people called Whips who ensure that members of the party vote in accordance
with the party leaders. So concord is guaranteed! As for not abolishing
long-term principles: hm.Now what are
they?

One is that, in Western democracies, the
adults determine who will temporarily govern
the commons, the land and the commonwealth. So the government is a steward, not
the owner, of the nation's resources and ethos. Exactly so: in Sangha, we can’t
give away long-term valuables, such as land, unless to exchange it for
something equivalent. We hold such things in trust for the Sangha of the
future.

However since the 1980s and Margaret Thatcher,
the ethos of every government has been to transfer much of what was corporate
and held in trust for the nation to the private sector. Water, electricity, and
all source of energy; airports, and some sea-ports; postal services and
telecommunications; railways and rented housing for lower-paid workers: all
that has gone barring a few traces. The rationale behind this was that it would
lessen the tax burden and improve efficiency. I don’t get it: other European
countries run their own utilities, why doesn’t the UK steward just hire some
better managers? And as for tax: Value-Added Tax has steadily risen from 8% to
20%. Perhaps the idea was that anyone could take shares in these private
enterprises, so ordinary people could thereby take ownership of the national
assets and even derive wealth from them. But the percentage of such ownership
has steadily dropped from 40% of the pre-Thatcher era to 12% in 2013.1Perhaps ordinary people couldn't compete with
the savvy and financial clout of multi-national corporations, or the
state-subsidised enterprises of other nations – who have therefore acquired the
national infrastructure.

A consequence of the UK government’s
eagerness to privatize and deregulate the economy is that corporations can use
British infrastructure, its ordered climate and open access, without taking on
the financial or moral responsibility of being part of the nation.Some multi-nationals (like Amazon) use legal
loopholes to be incorporated outside the UK so that they pay minimal tax, and
so offer lower prices than UK-based companies while using UK infrastructure. Deregulation
also means that global enterprises will seek to employ workers in the lowest
paid areas of the world, where labour laws are few. 'Sweatshops' is the term;
they're good for the economy.

The idea could have been that if you fix
the economy, then the society will benefit. Well, obviously, the economy
counts. But it needs careful regulation to avoid the snare of greed. This
should be a constant principle, especially as part of Britain’s legacy has been
the rise of shareholder capitalism, an economic surge that caused it to seek,
acquire and derive financial benefit from a huge area of the Earth. And hold
onto it through military means. What was the result of all that? Well, a few
got very rich, while the colonized people worked in dire conditions, and back
home, the lower classes lived in slums, in poverty, or emigrated. So the social history of
nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Britain was about dealing with
inequalities and giving fairer distribution, as well as education, voting and
health to the society as a whole. It was a struggle, often met with resistance
(the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Peterloo Massacre etc.), but a corporate State with
an ethos of fairness was the result. And consequently a principle of nationhood
came to be: if you want to use our resources, you have to take responsibility
for the nation, the people as a whole and the land we live on.

This leads on to the principle of 'protecting women and girls’, which in contemporary society translates into
looking after the disadvantaged and more vulnerable sections of the society. In
the UK this was the inclination that led to the Welfare State, with
unemployment benefit and government-owned housing for those of lower income.
This also needs to be remembered at the current time when in the UK the gap
between the rich and the poor has grown, as has the number of homeless people.
Up to one million people now depend on food banks (places to which people
donate food) for their sustenance. The prices for basic utilities increases
every year, beyond the increase in wages or the rate of inflation, and the free
Health Service is sliding towards privatization. There are protests (one within
48 hrs. of the recent election) and riots. The statistics show that the economy
has improved, but has the society?

It's good to step back and review what a
society and a nation are about. In the 1990s, the United Nations pioneered the
Human Development Index (HDI), an alternative measure of development that
combined measures of health (life expectancy at birth), education, and economic
standard of living. The first Human Development Report defined the HDI and its
purpose specifically against the growing reliance on national income measures:

‘The idea that social arrangements must be
judged by the extent to which they promote “human good” goes back at least to
Aristotle ...

‘But excessive preoccupation with GNP
growth and national income accounts has obscured that powerful perspective,
supplanting a focus on ends by an obsession with merely the means.’(UN 1990: 9)

The there is the matter of the spirit or
‘honouring shrines’ in the case of the Vajjians. What shrines do our nation and
our governing body honour? War memorials? At times Mrs. Thatcher's views seemed
to suggest that the economy was part of a spiritual remedy for the failed
nation: 'Economics are the measure, the object is to change the heart and
soul,' was one of her comments.Change
from what to what, I wonder. To take the gain-loss shift of financial assets to
be the defining mark of human advancement surely indicates that the
body-politic has lost touch with spiritual truth.The view of this kind of economy is that we
are lazy and irresponsible, and also that we're in shortage.

But if humans aren’t always that interested
in being stressed-out in some meaningless job, and worrying that they might get
laid off at a moment’s notice –‘zero-hour contract’ (good for the economy) – is
that so weird? What motivates people to work anyway? The economist E.F. Schumacher
(of Small Is Beautiful fame2) offers his perspective:

'The Buddhist point of view takes the
function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilize
and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by
joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and
services needed for a becoming existence … To organize work in such a manner
that it becomes meaningless, boring… or nerve-racking … would be little short
of criminal ... Equally to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would
be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human
existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same
living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and
the bliss of leisure.'

My sense is that if work requires personal
initiative, company you can trust and a meaningful outcome, people love to do
it. In the circles that I move in, voluntary, unpaid, or cover-costs work is
quite normal. As in monasteries: if you come, you don’t pay, you give what you
like; while you’re here your food and board is looked after – but you’re
expected to keep the moral standards, work, join in and accept responsibility.
None of this is imposed by financial carrots or legal sticks; it is explained
as a way of finding value in oneself by respecting others, sharing and offering
service. People work because meaningful work and cooperation feels good. In
spiritual communities, it is modelled as leading to peace, clarity and
contentment. How many leaders do that?

These personal examples are tiny, but they
do point to a feature of socially-engaged humans: they offer medical services,
they work re-creating habitat for wildlife, they create Open Source software (thanks
for that!), often for low or moderate pay, because it enriches their lives. So
workers’ cooperatives have always been a feature of alternative capitalism,
whereby the workers own the company. They present a model of cooperation and
responsibility that has social implications.

On the other hand we look at the
deregulated economy, the norm is CEO’s who earn millions, cut-throat
competition and behaviour that lapses into criminality. And that has social
implications too. Look at the record of some of the UK’s leading companies.
Hong-Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation or HSBC: found guilty of
money-laundering and dealing with Mexican drug cartels, it was fined $1.9
billion (not much, considering its annual profits amount to over $16 billion);
no one was jailed, because no one was responsible. Barclay’s Bank: found guilty
of fiddling with the LIBOR (that’s an exchange rate). Shell Oil devastates the
Niger Delta; BP’s carelessness pollutes the oceans and kills innumerable
animals. Sure, the company may acknowledge an error in one department, but
nothing fundamental in the ethos of the company changes. It exists to make
money, period. The shareholders, the 'owners' of the company, don’t even hold
the shares. According to Michael Hudson, a former Wall Street economist at
Chase Manhattan Bank, the average time that a share is held in the USA ranges
between twenty and twenty-two seconds: then they're sold. Shares have become
commodities to be traded, the professional shareholder is a share-gambler; and
no one accepts responsibility for the behaviour of the company.Hence irresponsibility, for the environment,
for the people and even for the law, is a consequence. With the society
dominated by this kind of heart and soul, it's no wonder some members of the
public aren’t that motivated.

Actually, the above-mentioned companies are
only British in name: they are morally and socially indifferent to the welfare
of their location and are only based here because government policy since the
nineties has been to give them tax benefits and freedom from supervision.
Consequently the economy has picked up speed, because the stewards of the
nation took their hands off the steering wheel, and
allowed ‘market forces’ to direct the economy (which, as it now controls
essential services also directs the society). Meanwhile, the nation has to pay
for the environmental and social damage caused by a free-rein economy. That’s
‘market forces’; it’s a global predicament. (Britain is definitely not alone, e.g. in April, Deutsche Bank was fined $2.5 billion for doing the same as Barclay's) .

As for shortage: there was no shortage when
the financial system went belly-up in 2008 due to speculative greed; the treasuries just printed more
money. Also there’s a lot of money hidden away: the UK-based Tax Justice
Network estimated that in 2010, undisclosed private wealth stashed in tax
havens amounted to between $21 and $32 trillion. (The GDP of the UK is about $
2.85 trillion.) So if tax evasion was dealt with and higher tax placed on
invested wealth; if military expenditure were reduced; if fossil fuel companies
were no longer handed subsidies (IMF estimates $5.3 trillion /year) but obliged to pay to
clean up their damage – then there's no shortage. But because global capitalism
works by shifting its assets and tax burdens into the cracks between national
jurisdictions, its regulation needs an international approach. This makes
sense; states can no longer be defined
by geographical boundaries. Since so much of Britain is owned by the
international economy and geared to its needs, it has to be part of an
international jurisdiction. Then we might be able to focus on the ethical heart
of nationhood. For that we need wise stewardship; of which there is a shortage.
Shortage is a feature of the non-cooperative and hoarding economy.
Internationally, cooperatively, there is no shortage.

I don't know much about economics, but
I do observe society. And yes, there are areas where heart and soul do need to
change; that has always been the Buddhist focus. But it's through right view
and intentions based on goodwill, compassion and non-greed that right action
and right livelihood come about. To put it in terms of economics, I'll quote
Schumacher again: 'Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics
of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilization not
in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. '

That's an attitude in line with elders such
as the Buddha and Aristotle; it gets my vote.

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1 According
to James Meek(author of Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else: pub. Verso 2014)